Local higher education prepping students for high tech future

Kevin Anderson

To compete in our highly competitive global economy, our local businesses need skilled workers, and to compete for those jobs, workers increasingly need some form of higher education to gain those skills.

In the second week of our series looking at how technology is reshaping education in our communities, we will hear from leaders and professors of our local higher education institutions about how they are using technology to engage students, do more with less resources and bring down the costs of higher education to make it more accessible to more students.

Sister Christine Stoller of Silver Lake College is a great example of how technology has changed and is changing education over the years. When she was at college, educational technology was a movie projector, and they used slide rules in math class.

Now, students in her Media in Education course are learning about blogs, wikis, smart boards and how to use tablets in education.

To keep pace with the rapid changes in technology being used in education, her course is revised each semester.

We also hear from Dr. Jessica Lyn Van Slooten, an associate professor in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin-Manitowoc about how she is using a range of technologies to engage her students.

To help classics like Jack Kerouac's On the Road come to life, she uses the site Placing Literature to allow her students to see landmarks in literature.

Her students use blogs to hone their writing skills and get feedback from others and sites such as Pinterest, which allow her women studies students to collect images related to their courses.

In this installment of the series, we also hear from Lakeshore Technical College and how they work closely with local businesses to make sure their graduates have the skills that local businesses need.

All of our local colleges are using the latest in technology to prepare students for an increasingly high tech world. LTC is using 3-D printers to allow their students to gain skills in this technology that is revolutionizing manufacturing by allowing rapid prototyping.

LTC also is using the latest clinical health care human patient simulators. These simulators offer students a truly lifelike medical experience and are able to blink and interact with students.

It is a challenge for our higher education institution to keep pace with this change, but this week we hear how they are meeting this challenge.

Remember to check back next week when we hear from students as they write about their experiences with technology and education. They talk about how their struggles with the distraction of social media, the pressures to have the latest, greatest technology and whether they think teachers should be able to take their cellphones away.

ServingManitowoc|Two Rivers|Wisconsin

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Local higher education prepping students for high tech future

To compete in our highly competitive global economy, our local businesses need skilled workers, and to compete for those jobs, workers increasingly need some form of higher education to gain those

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